Having ‘unwrapped’ Beethoven,
Chopin, Mozart, and Brahms, Kings Place has turned in 2013 to the greatest
composer of them all, Johann Sebastian Bach. Even for a year-long festival,
much of Bach’s voluminous surviving output will remain unperformed, but there
is certainly a good deal on offer throughout the year. Here we heard a pair of
cantatas and a pair of concertos, those old Bach hands in the Academy of St
Martin the Fields joined by soprano, Carolyn Sampson.

Three out of the four works
featured a prominent role for flute, hence Michael Cox’s soloist billing. He
and Sampson proved nicely matched in the opening Non sa che sia dolore, a rare instance of Bach in Italian, if
indeed it is by Bach at all. (It sounds as though it is.) The ASMF’s Sinfonia convincingly
plunged us into the musical thick of it, the orchestral contribution being perhaps
the finest I have heard in this cantata. Despite the small numbers (strings
4.4.3.2.1), there was requisite harmonic depth to the aria, ‘Parti pur e non
dolore’, possessed of a fine sense of inevitability. Rhythmic precision did not
come at the cost, as so often it does nowadays, of a hard-driven performance;
there was nothing unyielding to any of the movements. There was occasionally
something a little woolly to Cox’s tone; I wondered whether this were a hat-tip
to the Baroque transverse flute. Whatever the truth of it, it did not perturb.
Sampson’s tone was bell-like in its clarity without that entailing a lack of
femininity; it seemed thoroughly apt for a secular cantata. Vocal and
instrumental exuberance were not bought at the cost of the weird exhibitionism
that sadly characterises so much present-day Bach performance.

The orchestra was pared down
further for the ‘Triple’ Concerto for flute, violin, and harpsichord (strings
4.3.2.2.1). Again, despite the small numbers, i was immediately struck by the
harmonic depth of the ASMF’s performance. And what a relief it was to encounter
sensible tempi in an age that often lauds as ‘exciting’ breakneck performances
that never so much as permit Bach’s music to breathe. Balance between the
soloists was well-nigh ideal: not clinically so, just apparently ‘right’. The
first movement even had me come close to leaving on one side my dislike of the
harpsichord as a solo instrument, so convincing were Steven Devine’s shaping of
phrases and projection. Devine, Cox, and Stephanie Gonley all displayed
admirable flexibility within a stricter overall framework. In the slow
movement, the harpsichord (inevitably?) tended towards the merely ‘tinkling’; I
longed for the sustaining power of the piano, but that was hardly the soloist’s
fault. Gonley’s violin sounded wonderfully viola-like in its richness of tone.
Again, balance was exemplary. Bach’s ‘learned’ counterpoint made its point in
the finale, but so did his equally fine melodic genius in a shapely, stylish
performance. If the harpsichord solos were at times a little clattering, that
again was the fault of the instrument, not the performer.

The ‘Double’ Violin Concerto
was the only disappointment of the evening. All three movements, but especially
the outer two, were driven far too hard. Bach had no opportunity to breathe.
The opening movement sounded as if a modern Vivaldi performance had been transferred
to Bach’s music. ‘Calm down!’ one wanted to tell the players. Even the slow
movement was harried – and Bach should be no more harried than Mozart.
Ultimately, it proved prosaic, charmless even. O for the Oistrakhs...

Ich
habe genug was given in
its later version for soprano and flute (and should therefore have been marked
in the programme as BWV 82a, not 82).
The replacement of the original oboe with the flute makes the music less
plangent, and a soprano can never hope to project the gravity of a Hotter or a
Fischer-Dieskau. Nevertheless, this was a fine performance on its own terms,
which certainly brought with it different Passion resonances. Again the depth
of orchestral sound, doubtless assisted by the excellent Hall One acoustic, was
crucial to the performance’s success. Recitative was supple, and if ‘Schlummert
ein’ has been taken more slowly, it certainly did not fall prey to the
inappropriate turbo-drive of the Double Concerto. Might not an organ, though,
have been a better choice of continuo instrument than the harpsichord? Sampson’s
low notes could not have the resonance of, say, John Shirley-Quirk in his great
recording with Sir Neville Marriner and the ASMF, but this remained a moving
account. The fast tempo of the final aria, ‘Ich freue mich auf meinen Tod,’
worked very well, both on its own terms and as a response to the strange Pietist
words, a Christian never being at home in this world. Ornamentation was
flawless, without loss to Bach’s humanity.